Rian Johnson Breaks Down a Scene From 'Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery'

Josh O'Connor is really something special.

The whole movie hinges on the audience

being on this character's side.

And Josh can fake being a likable person incredi...

No, he's one of the most likable people in the world.

It's absurd.

He has a big heart right there.

So I'm using this to its full extent.

Has this ever, this is like film school right here.

Hi, I'm Rian Johnson.

I'm the writer and director of Wake Up Dead Man.

And this is Notes On a Scene.

[tense music]

I tell you something, I don't even like the devil.

What we're looking at here is a scene

that's in the middle of the investigation,

and our setup here is Father Jud,

who's played by Josh O'Connor, is being brought along

by Detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig,

and they're accompanied by Geraldine,

who is the local police chief played by Mila Kunis.

We shot the movie mostly in London.

We did a little bit of second unit work

in a small town up in the Hudson Valley.

And this is a drone shot from there.

And then this is kind of an interesting effect shot

because the facade of this bar

was built on a stage in London.

And I think also some of the sidewalk

is a set lit by lights to make it look like it's sunlit.

And we went to a great expense

to get Blanc's car right here is shot

in upstate New York in a small town.

Movie magic now ruined for you.

Sorry.

This is the murder weapon.

Slight spoiler alert, if it's a spoiler

that there's a murder in the murder mystery,

you just got it.

And this head, this wolf head was a lamp top

in one of the lamps in this bar

and it's been removed at some point

and used as the top of this knife.

And so that's why they're investigating this place.

I tell you something, I don't even like the devil.

You know, El Diablo, it sounds classy, Italian, that's fine.

Noah Segan, star of stage and screen

with that ridiculous mustache.

I try and isolate the role that has the most potential

for absolutely stupid facial hair.

And then I put Noah Segan in it.

Noah is one of my best friends

and he was in my first movie Brick

and I mostly put him in all these movies

partially 'cause he's a good actor, but mostly just because

it gives me and Daniel somebody

to go out drinking with at night.

His teacher says, I spent the night with Burt Reynolds,

and then the back of it says,

at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater,

which he was very happy I let him wear it.

You know that my wife, she buys a devil sign,

then she buys the devil lamps, and people start,

Oh hey, get him a devil thing for the bar.

He loves it.

And then, you know, devil, devil, devil, bang, I don't know.

This is a really beautiful set.

This was a Rick Heinrich special.

Rick was our production designer.

There we go, that's a good shot of it.

And you get a good shot of my brother right there also.

Rick Heinrich, I worked with on The Last Jedi.

And then he designed Glass Onion,

which had some huge scale sets.

And this set is not a big massive one.

Our biggest set was the church.

The interior of the church is actually also

one of the most amazing sets I've ever walked onto

that Rick Hendrich designed.

But this, I love just how rich it is.

And this is largely, there's the set design

and then there's the art department

who actually dresses the set

with all of this amazing detail.

And you can see they basically had this idea

that this poor guy started a devil-themed bar.

Everyone started giving him more devil stuff

and now he's trapped in this bar.

It's kind of like when somebody learns,

oh, she loves rabbits.

And suddenly this poor friend of yours

is getting 18 rabbit-themed gifts for their birthday

and is cursed with being surrounded

by rabbits in their life.

It's like that, but with the devil.

So we had great fun thinking of different kind of variants

of different posters and stuff.

And there's also, there's this dude here

who I guess is a professional wrestler

who is kind of pizzeria themed.

The hundreds of people are screaming

at the screen right now.

I don't know his name.

Noah is probably furious at me when he watches this,

but that's a little Easter egg for you.

And this is my brother and this is his son and his wife.

And yes, they're all there.

And this is something very special.

I was buddies with the late great Ricky J,

who was an amazing magician and a scholar of magic

and many other things.

And I try and work Ricky into every one of these movies.

Very happy to have Ricky in the movie representing.

[Benoit] But that's it, right, that's-

[Nikolai] Yeah.

So this is figuring out the clue of the devil head.

[Nikolai] But you know, it wasn't red though.

It's red now.

It's paint.

Yes, yes, freshly painted.

And filled it with some kind of plaster

and stuck the blade in that way.

A big thing in this movie is the way the murder happens,

Father Jud is kind of the only one

who's in close proximity to this impossible murder.

[Father Jud] I'll do whatever it takes to save it.

To cut you out.

Basically everyone in the town thinks he's guilty

and most of the congregation hate him for different reasons.

And so this video has leaked out

where he was kind of dressing down the guy who was murdered.

It's going around town.

All to say I use that moment in this scene

to kind of just twist the knife a little bit with him

and have this random looking jerk customer number one

listening to that clip.

Just to kind of turn the screws on Jud a little bit

partway through this.

[Father Jud] Like a cancer.

[Nikolai] Hey, hey, Eddie, hey, come on, take a snack.

Daniel Craig's magnificent look,

his sartorial beauty in this,

it's something that he and our costume designer,

Jenny Eagan, work out together.

And inevitably what happens is Daniel will read the script,

he'll get the vibe of it.

He'll usually come to Jenny with some kind of idea,

in this case, I don't wanna speak for him

and probably get it wrong, but he brought her references

of '70s tailoring for men.

So it has a very kind of distinct cut

and they create a couple of

absolutely drop dead gorgeous suits.

Daniel Craig is inside the suits,

which is part of what makes them incredibly gorgeous.

I don't know that I would be able to pull this look off,

but man, he's a good looking dude in them.

The red devil head thing, that ended up where?

In the church.

I threw it at the church and it broke a window.

I don't know why.

Josh O'Connor is really something special.

This guy right here.

When I watched him in Challengers,

which was my favorite movie of that year, I just,

there's something magnetic about him and I met with him

and he's really something special.

It's not like the part changed significantly from the page

to the screen, but he brought it up to another level

just because the whole point of this character,

it's similar to Janelle Monae's part in Glass Onion

or Ana de Armas' part in Knives Out.

It's a character that the whole movie hinges on the audience

being on this character's side.

You need the audience to have empathy for the character.

And that's not something you can buy or easily manipulate.

That's something that really has to come from

it being as simple as the audience likes this person.

And Josh can fake being a likable person incredi...

No, he's the one of the most likable people in the world.

It's absurd.

He has a big heart right there.

So I'm using this to its full extent.

Has this ever, this is like film school right here.

[Father Jud] And then after the Chrism Mass on Monday,

Martha said she found a small broken window.

Kids.

But nothing else.

A little flashback here,

we got a little glimpse of Glenn Close as Martha.

Look at that gaze.

Oh my god, just get lost in those eyes.

She's kind of the keeper of the church.

She is very devout and she doesn't like at all

that someone has broken this window.

She thinks it's-

Kids.

That's one thing about these movies,

they're full of little flashbacks, little flash forwards,

little flash to the sides.

They're full of little narrative things like that.

One of the things in writing them

and then in the editing with my editor Bob Ducsay,

it's always about figuring out

what is going to make this easiest

for the audience to process.

A flashback that shows you something

that visually supports exactly what you're hearing

is gonna kind of go with the grain

and just, it's all about taking the onus off of the audience

in terms of keeping track of all this stuff.

There's a lot to keep track of in this movie.

It's interesting, when I made my first movie Brick,

the one thing I hadn't done was work with real actors.

I had made lots of shorts, I knew shots, I knew editing,

I knew something about writing.

The one thing I had never experienced

is working with actors.

And so it's the thing I was most terrified of.

I think because I had built up in my head some idea

that they have some secret language they talk

and you have to know some kind of method

or some way of like talking to them.

And it instantly became my favorite part

of the whole process once I realized that

with really good actors, it's not that at all.

It's play.

It's communication and it's play

and it's forming a bond of trust.

And the reality is the more actors I've worked,

I've been really, really blessed with getting to work

with some of the best actors in the world.

It's not like it's harder working with great actors.

It's actually a lot easier working with great actors.

Not just because they're good,

but because if they are truly great at it,

it's because they love the process.

They want, like Glenn Close is a fantastic example.

Glenn Close loves making movies.

She shows up on set every day

and she has these like childlike eyes

when she shows up on set.

Just like, What do we get to do today?

The whole rest of the cast and me,

we just fed off of her energy.

For somebody who's had the career that she has

and has the roles under her belt that she's got,

to see her show up every day as if this is like

the first day that she gets to do this,

it's pretty thrilling and it's also

what leads to great performances

'cause that means they're gonna be engaged.

They're not coming at this with like,

okay, I'll throw out a number five.

I know how to do this one.

They're coming at every day building it from the ground up.

All right, so this is a gag I'm very happy with.

Essentially Blanc is realizing that

he can line up this photo of the bar

and kind of get a before and after picture

of when the devil head was here

and then it's gone.

The easy way, the sane way to do this

would've been with a comp, to just shoot this green screen.

That's not how we did it.

We actually, we set up our Alexa camera right here.

We got this shot, we got the shot

that we positioned Jeremy here,

we positioned Noah here and got this shot for the still.

And then we left the camera locked down

while we went and put the shot in Photoshop

and explored the still from it and printed out the still

and put it in this frame while we left the camera here.

So it was the exact same perspective, exact same lens,

which is why it lines up perfectly

when he pulls it back and forth.

And I was very happy 'cause this whole thing with Noah

leaning into the exact same position was kind of something

that we just discovered while we were shooting it.

That was a very happy accident.

It's always fun when you have

these weird little practical ideas

and then you do 'em on set and you can actually see him

and the whole crew is like, Ah, that works.

Look, that was [speaks in foreign language].

Look at that.

So Blanc, he functions in these movies

kind of in the same way that Poirot functions

in Agatha Christie's films or Miss Marble

or any of the great detectives.

For me, kind of the key to it is that

Blanc is never actually the protagonist of these films.

There's always a character who is carrying the lead.

In this case, it's Josh O'Connor's character, Father Jud.

But Blanc always serves a very distinct purpose in it.

And he always is written not as,

let's learn more about Blanc in the story,

but as what is Blanc's function in this mystery.

And then we learn more about him

through how he engages with that.

In this movie, it's all about

his relationship with Father Jud.

Father Jud is a very good, very devout priest

and he's someone who has a good heart

and genuinely tries to be Christ-like in his life and love.

And Blanc is a man of reason, a man of rational thinking,

and doesn't think very much of the church,

but they form kind of a partnership

and a friendship throughout the course of the movie

because it's a man of faith

and a very sincere, good-hearted man of faith in Father Jud,

who Blanc is kind of partnered with throughout this.

Daniel and I kind of had a lot of conversations

digging into what Blanc's feelings about faith are.

And Daniel had the very good instinct,

and this is something that developed

when working with Daniel kind of in rehearsals,

that the harder Blanc was set on the opposite side of Jud

in terms of their perspective on faith,

the stronger the film would be

because that relationship then

is gonna have to be truly earned by two people

who are coming at it from very, very different perspectives.

That was a incredibly smart insight on Daniel's behalf.

I think it really plays on the movie.

This is, I mean, it's a Benoit Blanc mystery.

So first and foremost, it's a big fun entertainment.

This is, for me, even a little more personal

than the previous movies because faith and religion

is at the heart of this movie.

And I grew up very Christian.

I grew up not Catholic.

This movie is set in a Catholic church.

I grew up Protestant,

kind of what we would call evangelical today.

I was a youth group kid and it wasn't just that

my parents took me to church.

I really, my whole perspective in life

was really based on a relationship with Christ.

It was very important to me.

I'm not anymore, I've kind of grown away from that

later in life, but it's still something

that I have deep feelings about.

So this movie, in a way, by having Father Jud

and Benoit Blanc kind of talk about this

and kind of butt heads about it, it was a way for me

to take both of those perspectives inside me

and get them talking with each other.

[Benoit] Do you see that?

[Rian] Jud then spots the thing that is,

it's a little bit like that bar game

of what's different between these two pictures.

[Father Jud] Yeah.

Jud spots, if you'll notice,

Dr. Nat played by Jeremy Renner right here, is gone,

but his bag is here.

Zoink.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He notices the bag is still here.

That's interesting.

He goes, oh yes, it's a doctor's bag.

And there was a fresh drink here.

And that means Dr. Nat is there in the bar

and is caught having a liquid lunch.

Enter Jeremy Renner, who he claims is just-

Just having some lunch.

Jeremy cracks me up.

When he came in, he's like,

Okay, so I figure this guy is just like

the saddest sack in the universe, and seriously.

And I said, Yeah, that's basically it.

And then he brought kind of a physicality to it

and kind of like a bumbling nature

that I think all the other actors,

a lot of whom have done a lot of comedy work,

were really, really surprised

by how funny Jeremy Renner was.

I don't think anyone kind of expected that.

We asked permission to use his face

in the Renning Hot! hot sauce.

But then we just kind of ignored the fact

that Jeremy Renner exists as a celebrity in this universe.

And he's just an actor playing a doctor in this one.

Let's see if we can actually find,

because this would be where it is.

But I don't see it.

It's not this.

It's not this,

it's not here.

I don't think so, I think it's tucked away

somewhere deep, deep, deep.

'Cause I remember I spent a lot of time in the edit room

freeze framing and seeing if I could find it.

You would think it would be in the hot sauce thing,

but somehow it's not.

Anyway, anyone spots it, they win a prize.

Get you a bottle of the Renning Hot! hot sauce.

Nat, I can come over later if you wanna talk.

I didn't, I don't think, yeah, yeah.

I don't think I'd prefer that.

I'd prefer not that.

All of the suspects in this

are members of the congregation of the parish

and each one of them is kind of in a different way

under the sway of Josh Brolin's character, Monsignor Wicks,

who has a very kind of, it's us against the world.

We're under siege, we're in the castle together.

We have to fight back against the world

and defend ourselves type view of Christianity.

He's kind of exploited weaknesses in each one of them

to draw them in, to kind of radicalize each one of them

and draw them in closer to him.

Jeremy plays a character whose wife,

who was the center of his universe, has just left him.

And Wicks kind of gets inside his head

and starts kind of drawing out

that bitterness in Jeremy's character.

So it is kind of a comic performance,

but there is a real hook of real dark anger

at the heart of it.

And Wicks, who's Josh Brolin's character,

is very much exploiting that in this movie.

In casting these movies,

the vibe on set is very important.

I used to think we got very lucky each time

that we got a group of actors who

we never had any issues with, like, ego,

everyone loved hanging out with each other.

I think you can tell in the movie,

but it's genuinely the case on set.

These people actually like each other.

No one went back to their trailers in between setups.

They would all just hang out together

and like play backgammon.

It felt like camp a little bit.

And that's been the case on all three of these films.

Now, having witnessed it a few times,

I think it's not like we're like doing

some kind of dating service casting process

where we're selecting personality types that will get along

'cause I'm not that smart honestly.

I think there's a certain element of it

where it's a self-selecting process

'cause we're going after movie stars.

We're going after people who are all used to

being number one on the call sheet

and being the leads in their own movies.

And we're going to them with ensemble parts

in a true ensemble cast.

And that means anyone who says yes to one of these movies

is gonna be cool, and by cool, I mean is going to,

they're not gonna come on set with a big movie star ego.

They're gonna come on set for the only reason

it makes sense, which is that

they genuinely wanna be part of the ensemble

and feed off the other actors' energy

and have that experience.

And so in that way, it's been really nice

and it's been, I don't know, one of the joys from me

is getting to see all these talented actors

kind of come together and sort of, you know,

circle each other and feel each other's energy out

and then kind of coalesce into this group

by the end of the shoot.

Ah, there it is.

Here's what you did it with, huh?

Come on now.

Cut him out like a cancer?

You son of a bitch.

[Customer] You tell him, Nat.

Yeah.

So tonally, this movie is,

it's a little bit darker than the previous ones,

but it's still a Benoit Blanc mystery

and so it still is funny and entertaining,

and that balance, it was really tricky in this script.

This is definitely the hardest script

I've ever had to write.

And a lot of that was because of the themes and the tone

and trying to make them feel like the humor was balanced

with the scary and the creepy moments

and that the themes felt like they had weight

but they didn't feel ponderous

and god forbid they didn't feel preachy

in one way or the other.

Writing a murder mystery is a lot of work.

It's all well and good, but that's kind of like

solving a crossword puzzle.

The real work of the script and the reason

it was actually really hard was balancing

those more delicate elements.

A big part of this movie is, I mean, they're very layered.

These are movies that hopefully hold up

to being watched multiple times.

And there are movies where every scene

is kind of working on a few different layers

in terms of planting things that when you first watch it,

you don't know you're supposed to be paying attention to.

Hopefully the next time you watch it, you're like,

Aha, that's when this happened in plain sight.

And it is right there and they were playing fair with me.

It seems like these movies are,

and they are, they're planned out kind of like

to the nth degree and they're kind of like jigsaw puzzles

or mouse traps or pick your metaphor.

But the reality is they're still movies.

And so when you're writing,

and anyone who writes knows this,

you can do all the outlining, you can do all the planning,

you can have it all set.

And then when you actually do start typing the scenes

and the characters actually kind of come to life

and are just speaking through you as you're talking,

sometimes it will feel very, very wrong

the thing that you planned out in your grand scheme

and you learn over time to listen to that voice

when it feels wrong, to follow the voice of the character.

And it's kind of the most important thing to realize.

And I also know it because if I'm writing a scene,

if I'm really not enjoying writing the scene,

that will send my antenna up and I'll stop and step back

and I'll try and think,

okay, is it 'cause there's something

fundamentally wrong with this

and the character is telling me,

No, this isn't the scene I wanna be in.

There's a scene in the middle of the film,

I don't wanna spoil, but there's a very pivotal scene

with Josh's character.

It is a case where I had something entirely different

outlined for the movie.

And I hit this scene and kind of realized as I was typing,

it just started flowing in a completely different direction.

And I just followed it and it ended up being

kind of one of the pivotal scenes in the movie.

I know it's frustrating, I'm talking around it,

I don't wanna spoil it, but find me on the street.

Buy me a beer.

I'll tell you which scene it is.

But you really do learn these are still movies

and they have to feel alive.

And the only way for them to feel alive

is to listen to the characters when they're talking to you.

I'm a big outliner and that helps with stories like this

because I will spend the first 80% of the process

just working in notebooks.

And that lets me have kind of a zoomed out

like the Google Map zoomed out view of the story.

So if I see I have to pay something off here,

it's not like digging back in the script.

I can just flip back a few pages and see in the outline,

okay, that means I have to plant something

in this scene that sets that up.

And then when you're actually shooting this scene,

it's a balancing act because you never want the audience

to be aware that there obviously

that there are things that you're pointing out.

In fact, you wanna do the opposite.

You wanna have the scene just play on a very surface level

so that the audience is fully engaged with it

in the first viewing.

And it's only on other viewings that they catch the things.

And that also is just

a certain amount of trust in the audience.

It's letting things happen in the background.

Not feeling like you have to put a spotlight on everything,

but trusting the audience is smart enough

that when they watch in another time

and they see it there, it'll connect.

[Customer] Tell 'em, Nat.

Yeah.

Son of a bitch.

Killer priest.

[Interviewer] Do you want to tease

that there's a clue in this?

[Rian] No, good ask.